In the typical course of electronic communication, increasing amounts of data are generated and stored. As the demands for storage space increase, storage density becomes increasingly important. Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) techniques have been developed as one way to increase storage density at a device level, but devices using SMR techniques have certain operational characteristics that may be taken into account when they are deployed in data storage systems. For example, it may be impractical to write data to SMR devices in a non-sequential fashion, similarly to many tape-based storage devices. On such devices where non-sequential writes may be impractical, data may be written such that one or more portions of data are written contiguously upon the device. When such portions of data are associated with disparate write requests, however, it may be difficult, burdensome and/or inefficient to locate a location on the device to which each successive write should be committed so that they are contiguously positioned.